None Could Sleep
by Aoife-hime
Summary: [Sam x Jack] Sometimes, sleep is impossible. So what do you do then? Set Season 1 post Cold Lazarus.


A/N: If ever a story gave me trouble, this one did. I don't know why, but it did! Anyways, it's based on two lines from Regina Spektor's song "On the Radio": "Until it got so warm/That none of us could sleep". Please enjoy!

**None Could Sleep**

He was lying next to her.

Even with her brain still mostly clouded by sleep, she instinctively _knew_ he was there, sleeping soundly near her. Not close enough to wrap his arms around her, but close enough for her to feel uneasy. Why he was still there, she had no idea; to the best of her knowledge, she'd made it incredibly clear that she wanted nothing more to do with him or their shambles of a relationship. She continued to listen to his slightly heavy, steady breaths though; he was so close that she could even imagine the damp air he exhaled clinging to her already sweat-dampened skin like a thin sheet of muslin, uncomfortable as an ill-fitting second skin.

She tossed under the blanket, her hips digging painfully into her firm mattress. She was more awake now, more aware of his disturbing proximity. He was snoring lightly too now, apparently oblivious to the muggy Washington summer heat. She was aware of it, though, just as she was acutely aware that when he woke up he was probably going to want to… but no. That of all things was simply not going to happen.

A drop of sweat traced a thin trail across her back, ending its journey only when it encountered her already damp t-shirt. There were numerous things she hated about Washington, and the summer heat waves were just one of them. Present company, another. Turning again, she tried to get comfortable, but it was obviously impossible. She felt crowded, swamped beneath the thick humid air and the presence of _him_ next to her. Her skin was sticky and warm, her shirt and shorts twisted and clinging awkwardly to her body like clothes meant for someone larger than herself. She could feel another bead of sweat race a path down her temple, falling lightly over the ridges of her ear. And through it all, he kept breathing, slowly, evenly, heavily.

But there was something wrong, she realized as her mind slowly reassessed her situation. He shouldn't be lying next to her. He _couldn't_ be lying next to her. Because Jonas Hansen had died over three weeks ago…

Sam sat up, fully awake. She was gasping for air worse than if she'd been holding her breath the entire night. Not that it was doing her much good; the air was saturated with moisture and it felt almost like she was drowning on dry land. Her world started to blur at the edges, tilting ever so slightly even though Sam knew she was sitting upright. She needed to steady her breathing before she passed out and one of her teammates was left to find her. With that sobering thought in mind, she forced her breath into regular, controlled inhales and exhales. She sat for a few moments, legs tangled in her bedroll, staring unseeingly at the front flap of the tent. Not Washington. Not Jonas.

She looked over to her right. There was Daniel, still sleeping heavily and completely oblivious to the world around him, his skin tinged an alien shade of olive peridot by the moon light shining through the tent fabric. He lay sprawled across his bedroll with no obviously concern for how much space he was taking up. Sam managed a panicked yet assured sort of half smile at the sight. He looked so innocent when he slept, as if nothing bad had ever happened in his life. She was glad at least he was able to find some solace in sleep. If only she had such a luxury.

It could have been minutes or it could have been hours, but eventually Sam's heart stopped racing and her breathing slowed to normal. In the stillness of the early morning, she sat frozen upright, the synthetic fabric of her bedroll clinging uncomfortably to any exposed skin it came in contact with. The corners of her eyes stung with sweat and her shirt was still twisted strangely around her torso. Still, she couldn't bring herself to move.

Not Washington. Not Jonas. Not Washington. Not Jonas. But no matter how many times she reminded herself of that, the old memory of his body near hers would return and the humid, stale air of the tent would press in against her as the air in his old D.C. apartment had done that one summer, surrounding and drowning her.

She needed fresh air. She needed to get out of the tent. Without a second though, Sam disentangled her legs and scrambled out of the tent with all the grace of a newborn fawn.

"Monster under your bedroll, Captain?"

If she had been a different woman, she might have shrieked. But Sam didn't. She barely even jumped, Colonel O'Neill's unexpected remark seemingly not even fazing her. Her heart beating a rapid but steady beat somewhere in her throat testified differently, but no one besides her had to know about that. "No, sir," she returned automatically, all the while cursing herself for being caught off-guard. She should have remembered it was his time for watch and he, unlike Teal'c, was far more prone to commenting on strange occurrences. "I just, uh… needed some fresh air," she finished off lamely.

She heard the colonel take a deep breath from where he was standing guard, though from his position in the shadows at the edge of the tree line he seemed more to be skulking than anything else. "Ah, yes. Fresh air." He breathed in once more for good measure. "Is that manure I smell, Carter?"

"Yes, sir. At least, that's what it smells like," she admitted. She could practically hear her already flimsy excuse shattering into millions of tiny pieces.

"Very… fresh, isn't it?"

Sam rolled her eyes at the obvious sarcasm that dripped off of Colonel O'Neill's words. "Fresher than the inside of the tent," she mumbled to herself, taking a seat on the slightly rotted fallen branch she and Daniel had sat on earlier during dinner. She was fairly certain he hadn't heard what she said, as he let the conversation lag. That suited Sam just fine; she hadn't come out to chat, after all, just to clear her head so she could hopefully manage a few more hours of sleep before they had to continue their trek back to the stargate in the morning.

Sam's gaze wandered around the clearing SG-1 had set up camp in sometime around sunset. Even though the moonlight made the alien forest and clearing seem even stranger, she couldn't help but feel a certain sort of calm. Going off-world was familiar, and not in the way that Washington was familiar. Granted, off-world travel and exploration was incredibly dangerous at times, but her traveling companions were the best a person could ask for. They all still had their awkward moments around each other, but there was definitely a team dynamic that underlay any and all discomfited moments. And they, at least, didn't induce nightmares. Then, of course, there was the thrill she still felt every time she stepped into the event horizon, a thrill that hadn't dissipated as months passed and missions piled up. Nothing in Washington had ever been quite _that_ exciting. Living to see her theories proven correct and on top of that being able to experience them first hand… no scientist could ask for more.

Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed as Colonel O'Neill moved from his position near the forest to take a seat on the other end of her log. He didn't say anything to her, though; in no way did he attempt to make his presence known. He simply sat there, hands fingers moving restlessly back and forth across the fabric of his BDU's, alternately pinching and smoothing the fabric. Something in his actions reminded Sam of those of a child; restless, but unsure of whether or not to act. If they were other than who they were, she might have laughed, freely and easily, or at the very least smiled at his agitation. As it was, all Sam could bring herself to do was sigh quietly. Despite the unique dynamic of SG-1 and the SGC in general, she still wasn't certain how to act around her superior officer on occasions such as these. After all, there wasn't exactly a manual dedicated to how a junior officer should act when sitting on a log with his or her commanding officer in the middle of the night on a planet a couple hundred light years from Earth. As a result, Sam felt as if she kept a stick perpetually jammed up her posterior. Her only comfort in this behavior was that she knew she couldn't be reprimanded for following protocol.

Colonel O'Neill eventually progressed from fiddling with his uniform to tapping a quick pattern out on the log itself, his long fingers denting the rot-soft wood with each repeat of the phrase. The dull sounds seemed to stick in the heavy night air, quickly filling up the space between the two officers, covering the increasingly awkward and uncomfortable silence with a blanket of dead noise.

"Are you okay?" he finally asked, his words moving in to replace the tapping-covered silence that had reigned between them. The colonel's eyes focused on a non-descript spot some three feet in front of him and his brow was furrowed ever so slightly, but his fingers had finally stopped moving. Any fool could see he was more than a little ill at ease, but also that he was equally determined have the conversation, repercussions and discomfort be damned.

"Shouldn't I be asking you that, sir?" Sam mumbled in response before she could really think about what she was saying. All she knew was that she _really_ didn't want to think about Jonas at the moment and anything to avoid that subject seemed fair game at the moment.

"Hey, I'm not the one who couldn't get out of her tent fast enough just a few minutes ago. And I know for a fact that Daniel doesn't snore so bad to warrant a retreat such as that," the Colonel retaliated, just a little too defensively to be completely at comfortable with the current line of conversation.

"But you were the one who, just the other day, had a copy of himself walking around and talking to…" Sam trailed off awkwardly, her brain catching up with her tongue and realizing that maybe, just maybe, she was touching on subjects Colonel O'Neill didn't want to discuss just yet. It wasn't as if he'd made any effort in the days following the incident to talk to anyone, let alone anyone on SG-1, about his double and his double's actions. And on top of all that, he was her commanding officer. The most insubordinate commanding officer she'd ever encountered, but commanding officer nevertheless. "Sorry, sir. Wasn't thinking."

"Is that even possible?"

A sharp flash of indignant ire raced through her. She quickly attempted to squelch it out it before speaking. "What, that I'm sorry?" She winced as soon as the words left her mouth. Despite her best efforts, Sam could still hear her offense at the implication that she couldn't be sorry and she saw the colonel flinch before turning and facing her, eyes scrunched in frustration.

"No!" he exclaimed, his arms waving in vehement gestures to accompany his words. "No! No, that's not what… I _meant_ is it possible for you not to think. Because you always seem to be thinking… about things…" Colonel O'Neill's frustration at his own apparent inability to communicate melted away over the course of his apology, somehow managing to end up right back where they'd started: awkwardly familiar.

"Oh." It was an understatement to say that she felt foolish. Sam's only consolation was that because it was such a warm night, her skin was already a little pink. Her embarrassed flush was easily hidden.

"So, are you really okay?" he ventured after a few moments of slightly less awkward, though no less tense, silence.

"I'm fine," Sam answered quickly, hoping he would get the point and drop the subject.

"Really? Good." He paused, turning his head ever so slightly so he was actually looking more at her than the ground. Sam breathed a sigh of relief that for once, he _had_ taken the hint. "Are you sure you're fine?"

_Too good to be true_, she rationalized, suppressing a growl of frustration.Sam was silent for a moment, wondering if she should just lie her way out of this one. She could, quite easily in fact. Just one little word spoken with unfelt sincerity was all it would take. All her mouth had to do was form the word…

"No." Well, that was a catastrophic vocabulary failure if ever there was one. "Sort of," she amended quickly, making sure her eyes missed just how much undue concern emanated from her commanding officer. "It's nothing, really."

"That's a pretty big nothing, Carter, if it's got you scrambling from your tent on all fours," he noted, the mention of her ungainly escape from her tent causing the corners of his mouth to turn up just a little bit in what Sam had quickly learned to classify and a classic Colonel Jack O'Neill smirk.

For some reason, the smirk touched a nerve in her. It was completely irrational, but whenever she saw it, she couldn't help but feel that somehow he was making fun of her. At that moment, Sam couldn't get a justification for her actions out fast enough. "Alright, fine. If you really want to know, this climate reminds me a lot of the heat waves we used to get in Washington in the summer." She couldn't quite bring herself to look him in the eye, because if she looked him in the eye he would definitely see that she was only giving him an abridged version of the story.

"Did you run from your apartment in the middle of the night then, too?" he asked, a light note of humor lacing his tones.

"No. I…" she started, but paused. She almost lost her nerve, but that smirk was still there, lightly playing on her commanding officer's lips. "I thought that… geez, this is stupid. I thought that Daniel was Captain Hansen," she finally spit out. If she wasn't quite so anxious about his censure, Sam was pretty sure she would have been feeling relieved at that moment for finally sharing her nightmare with someone. "I was still mostly asleep," she added quickly as she saw the colonel's mouth open to speak, his smirk most definitely erased. "And I've never slept all that well in this weather anyways. I swear, sir, this isn't clouding my judgment or anything, it was just a dream -"

"Ah! Carter, stop!" Colonel O'Neill interjected. He was waving his hands about again, this time in overly large dismissive motions. "I get it. This weather plays with your mind."

She looked at him during in silence, her jaw hanging slack just a tiny bit. Colonel O'Neill, however, couldn't quite manage to meet her gaze. The question formed in her mind, but for once that night she thought before she spoke. Maybe this was just one of those things she would find out about when he was ready to tell her. "It's one of the reasons I was excited to transfer out of Washington, sir," she continued at a more reasonable pace, finding an explanation a safer topic of conversation. "For whatever reason, I've never dealt all that well with hot, humid air." It was a strange, oddly personal factoid to be sharing with her commanding officer, but sitting here in the middle of the night on an alien planet, it actually seemed like the natural thing to do. Kind of like how she still, even after all those years, felt that campfires and s'mores went hand in hand.

"I… understand that." Those were, quite possibly, the last words Sam had been expecting to hear from the colonel. She had been thinking more along the lines of 'Buck up, it's just a little water' or something equally as inane and grating, but no. He actually agreed with her. It was… weird. Unnerving. But… it was also kind of nice. It fit right in with her personal confession of her hatred of humid weather. And suddenly Sam found that she didn't want the conversation to end there. There was no rational explanation, just… it didn't seem quite right for it to stop.

"You're from Chicago, right? I don't suppose it gets quite as humid there as it does in D.C."

"It gets humid there, but yeah Washington is worse, at least from what I can remember. I try to avoid going there," Colonel O'Neill agreed with more than a bit of enthusiasm in his voice and any worries Sam had of whether or not the colonel would want to start up a more personal conversation with her were summarily dispelled. "And Minnesota's even drier than Chicago at times. My grandparents lived there and I used to visit them every summer… the mosquitoes there had landing lights."

"Landing lights, sir?" The way he said those words, serious, exaggerated, and almost as if in reverence to the memory of the annoying insects itself, made Sam want to burst out in uncontrollable laughter.

"Yes, Carter. Landing lights. Nearly take your arm off just trying to perch on it. Don't laugh, I'm serious," he cautioned with false severity as a giggle finally erupted from behind Sam's hand. She couldn't stop it though, so Colonel O'Neill simply rolled his eyes. "And the fish in my grandpa's lake were _this_ big," he continued enthusiastically, spreading his hands to an enormous breadth, the length of which most normal fresh water fish never reached. "It once took my grandpa, my dad, and me just to reel one of them in."

"I'm sure it did," Sam managed, her disbelief buried deep beneath layers of laughter. "I've never been fishing before. I didn't think it seemed all that fun," she mused.

He was facing her fully by now, and Sam had unconsciously mimicked his position. So it was incredibly easy for her to see the look of complete horror that now graced his face. "Not fun? You're joking, right?" She shook her head as he continued to look at her as if she had just grown a third arm. "Carter, you haven't lived until you've gone fishing."

"I'll take your word on that, sir."

"No, I'm serious," he pushed. "Fishing is… fishing is…" The colonel trailed off, unable to think up the best word to finish off his metaphor.

"Boring?" He shot her a dirty look for that comment, but Sam couldn't help but think it was worth it. For a supposedly stoic military man, the colonel had some pretty hysterical and animated facial expressions.

"No," he countered, almost petulantly. "Everybody should go fishing at least once before they die."

"Even Daniel?" For whatever reason, Sam had a hard time picturing Daniel sitting around at a lake somewhere up north waiting for a fish to come to him. It was almost as hard as it was for her to picture herself in such a position. He was patient, but not in that kind of way. Sam had a feeling that he would probably get bored within five minutes of casting his first line. And if there was one thing she'd picked up on right away, it was that a squirrelly Daniel Jackson made for one very surly Jack O'Neill.

A short and dry bark of a laugh escaped Jack's mouth. "Yeah, even Daniel. Teal'c, too." His mouth quirked in a friendlier version of the Colonel Jack O'Neill smirk. "Now that would be something to see… a Jaffa fishing."

Sam expressed her agreement in a light-hearted laugh, and it could have been a trick of the moonlight, but she could have sworn that the colonel's smirk got just a tiny bit softer. "I don't suppose they did a lot of that on Chulak… could you see Apophis fishing?"

Colonel O'Neill looked as if he couldn't decide whether he wanted to laugh or cry out in pain. "Captain! Are you trying to kill me?"

"Sorry, sir." Sam paused and a laugh escaped through her nose in the form of an unbecoming snort. "Still…"

"Carter, don't even go there."

She wasn't sure where the time went, but as the night wore on and bled into morning with hues of vibrant orange and rose, any and all thoughts of Jonas Hansen and Washington were been pushed into the farthest recesses of her mind.

* * *

Something had changed. Nothing gigantic or world-shaking, but something had definitely changed. It wasn't something tangible, something she could quantify or measure, just… a feeling. She still felt the need to be proper around him; she was the young one, the woman, the only junior officer on the team and she still felt a mildly irrational need to prove herself to him and to everyone else. But there was a feeling there now that hadn't been there yesterday. A sort of unspoken bond, or at least the start of one. 

It was because of that feeling that Sam didn't feel the need to pull him aside from the team as they broke camp that morning to ask him if he would keep her nightmares a secret.

She already knew he would.


End file.
